The Fiery Trial (26 page)

As to Douglas’s proposed “sedition” act, Republicans took this as an indication that the South’s “real grievance,” as the
Chicago Tribune
put it, was not so much the election of Lincoln, but northern public sentiment—“it is…the eradication of ideas that is demanded.” Indeed, during the crisis, members of Congress from the South frequently referred to the growth of antislavery public opinion as the reason their states could not safely remain in the Union, a position reiterated in the official declarations justifying secession. “Why not make the concession which they really want?” the Republican entrepreneur John Murray Forbes wondered sarcastically after Seward’s January 12 speech: a constitutional amendment allowing federal judges to determine “what it is proper to write or say” about slavery. Already, a number of Republican congressmen were warning that slavery could not survive a civil war. “The standard of revolt,” declared Sidney Edgerton of Ohio, “will be the signal of emancipation.”
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Buffeted by these crosscurrents of opinion, Lincoln struggled to keep abreast of the rapidly evolving crisis and to devise a consistent policy for dealing with it. At the same time, he began the process of selecting a cabinet, a task not completed until the very eve of his inauguration. In keeping with tradition, he offered the post of secretary of state to his chief rival for the presidential nomination, William H. Seward. He used the other appointments to satisfy the various political and regional factions in his party. Salmon P. Chase, perhaps the party’s leading Radical, became secretary of the Treasury; the more conservative Attorney General Edward Bates of Missouri and Postmaster General Montgomery Blair of Maryland represented crucial border slave states. Lincoln appointed Gideon Welles, a former Democrat from Connecticut, as secretary of the navy, and Caleb B. Smith, a former Whig from Indiana, to head the Interior Department. The most controversial choice was Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania as secretary of war. Cameron had a well-earned reputation for corruption, and a number of leading Republicans in his own state opposed his inclusion. The Chicago editor Horace White later called the choice of Cameron a “colossal blunder” within a year he would be replaced by Edwin M. Stanton, also of Pennsylvania. Some of Lincoln’s selections, including his rivals for the 1860 nomination, Seward, Chase, and Bates, had far more experience in national affairs than he, and Lincoln hoped their presence would reassure those who doubted his own administrative abilities. From the outset, Lincoln’s cabinet was marked by political rivalries and personal jealousies. It never really functioned as a unit. As president, Lincoln gave each member wide latitude in running his own department. But when it came to slavery, while from time to time he asked the cabinet’s advice, he would decide on policy himself.
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Until his departure for Washington on February 11, 1861, Lincoln remained in Springfield. To gauge public sentiment and political developments he relied on letters, newspapers, and conversations with a steady stream of visitors. It is not clear if Lincoln fully understood the severity of the crisis before his inauguration. Along with many other Republicans, he overestimated the strength of Unionism in both the seceded and non-seceded slave states and underestimated the willingness of the Deep South to go to war. Republicans had long believed that the mass of white southerners did not share the interests of the Slave Power. They had denigrated threats of secession as a ploy to intimidate the North into granting southern demands. John Bell’s victories in Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee and near-victories in Maryland and North Carolina, and Douglas’s capture of Missouri, strengthened Republicans’ conviction that the Upper South, at least, was strongly pro-Union. More than once, Lincoln referred to the crisis as “artificial,” suggesting that if “let alone” it would dissipate by itself.

A few days after the election, the
Illinois State Journal
, whose editorials were widely regarded as reflecting Lincoln’s views, assured its readers that the “conservative majority” of southerners would “put down any batch of traitors” bent on breaking up the Union. Even after states began to secede, Lincoln seems to have believed that if he did nothing to provoke the secessionists, the majority of slave states would remain in the Union and the Lower South would eventually return. Unlike his idol Henry Clay, he did not devote himself to pursuing a compromise that would resolve a national crisis.
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Lincoln received numerous pleas to issue public statements reassuring southerners that he had no intention of interfering with slavery or in other ways abridging their rights under the Constitution. He seemed to bristle at such demands. As he explained to one correspondent, his views were readily available in published speeches but had been persistently misrepresented in the South. He did compose a few lines for a speech Lyman Trumbull delivered at Springfield on November 20, 1860, with Lincoln sitting on the platform. Lincoln’s contribution pledged that his administration would not abridge the constitutional rights of the South, and indicated that talk of secession was the work of a minority. It even welcomed the “military preparation” being undertaken in southern states on the grounds that this would “enable the people” to suppress secessionist “uprisings.” Trumbull, who paraphrased Lincoln’s sentences rather than reading them verbatim, omitted this curious observation. Trumbull added an assurance that Republicans did not favor “negro-equality or amalgamation, with which political demagogues have so often charged them.”
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The speech did not have the desired effect. Not a single newspaper, Lincoln complained, used it to “quiet public anxiety.” “It is a mockery for Lincoln or his friends,” wrote a New Orleans journal, “to say [the South’s] rights will be respected, when we know that
their
interpretation of our rights is exactly the reverse of
our own
.” Lincoln resolved to make no further public statements. Rather than doing good, he believed, they “would do positive harm. The secessionists, per se believing they had alarmed me, would clamor all the louder.” Lincoln assumed that a dispassionate reading of his speeches would mollify southerners. In fact, it alarmed them, because he had consistently coupled assurances that he would not interfere with slavery in the states with a moral condemnation of the institution and hope for its ultimate extinction. Many southerners believed Lincoln posed as much a threat to the long-term existence of slavery as the abolitionists.
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Throughout the crisis, the
Illinois State Journal
published bellicose editorials widely thought to reflect Lincoln’s views and some possibly written by him. On December 20, the day South Carolina seceded, it warned that “treason must and will be put down at all hazards.” Another editorial predicted that civil war would result in “the total overthrow of slavery,” as slaves would escape to the North and might even rise against their masters. The paper denied that a Lincoln administration planned to interfere with slavery in the states or favored “the equality of the black and white race.” But it insisted that Lincoln “stands immovably upon the Chicago platform” and had no interest in any “compromise whatever.” The president-elect, the paper declared, using words that would find their way into Lincoln’s inaugural address, would have “an oath registered in Heaven” to uphold and enforce the laws. When William Kellogg, an Illinois Republican congressman, proposed a compromise including extension of the Missouri Compromise line, the paper denounced him: “He has sold himself to the slave power.”
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Two weeks before Lincoln’s inauguration, the
New York Times
complained that the Republican party lacked a “settled plan” for dealing with secession. In fact, throughout the crisis Lincoln displayed remarkable consistency. He proved willing to compromise on issues he had always considered inessential, but refused to countenance any concession that ran the risk of sundering the Republican party and surrendering the results of the election before his administration began. In December 1860 and January 1861, he intervened forcefully in congressional deliberations, something no previous president-elect had done, to delineate what kinds of conciliatory measures he would and would not support. On December 10, only one week after Congress assembled and talk of compromise began to circulate, Lincoln made his position clear to Lyman Trumbull in Washington: “Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery. If there be, all our labor is lost, and, ere long, must be done again…. Stand firm. The tug has to come, and better now, than any time hereafter.” Three days later he sent the same instructions to Elihu B. Washburne, who had written to alert Lincoln to the “imminent peril” that several states would soon secede, but also warning that on the question of compromise, Seward was “misrepresenting your position.” Lincoln reiterated his opposition to “compromise of any sort” on the expansion of slavery. “On that point,” he instructed Washburne, “hold firm, as with a chain of steel.”
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Lincoln did draw up resolutions to be introduced by Seward in the Senate committee considering the crisis, which he handed to Seward’s political alter ego Thurlow Weed, who visited Springfield in late December to plead for compromise. Apart from an affirmation that the Union “must be preserved,” they dealt entirely with the issue of fugitives from bondage. Lincoln called for effective measures for their return with “safeguards” against “free men…being surrendered as slaves,” as well as the repeal of northern personal liberty laws. Lincoln wrote to Trumbull that he thought the resolutions would “do much good.” “They do not touch the territorial question,” he pointed out. For this very reason, as Lincoln could have anticipated, they had no impact on congressional discussions.
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Another indication of Lincoln’s position on conciliation came in his responses to letters from John A. Gilmer of North Carolina and Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia, both avid opponents of secession (although after Georgia left the Union, Stephens would become the Confederacy’s vice president). Gilmer asked for reassurances regarding Lincoln’s intentions on a range of issues—abolition in the District of Columbia, the future of the interstate slave trade, federal interference with slavery in the states, the use of federal patronage, and “the disturbing question of Slavery in the Territories.” In his response, which soon became public, Lincoln remarked that Gilmer could hardly expect him to “shift the ground upon which I have been elected.” But he went on to promise to “accommodate” southern views on all the issues mentioned except one. “On the territorial issue,” he noted, “I am inflexible.” Repeating in somewhat different language a point he had made at Cooper Institute, Lincoln identified the “only substantial difference” between North and South: “You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted.” Lincoln repeated these very words a few days later in his letter to Stephens, whom he had befriended years earlier when they both served in Congress and who now asked him to make a public statement to help “save our common country.”
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Unionists in the Upper South begged Lincoln to support the Crittenden plan when it came before Congress in January. Opinion in “the whole southern states,” wrote Neill S. Brown, a former governor of Tennessee, was so inflamed that only in this way could the Union be saved. But Lincoln did not budge. As he explained to James T. Hale, a Republican member of Congress from Pennsylvania who urged him to support the proposal, he considered demands for compromise under threat of secession a kind of extortion:

On February 1, 1861, Lincoln replied to a long letter from Seward, who pleaded with him to respond to “the appeals from the Union men in the Border states for something of concession or compromise.” Lincoln began by reaffirming his inflexibility on the territorial issue—compromise on that point would “put us again on the high-road to a slave empire.” As to fugitive slaves, the nation’s capital, and so on, “I care but little,” so long as the measures adopted were not “altogether outrageous.” But in a significant shift in policy, Lincoln added that he could accept the plan to admit New Mexico as a slave state “if further extension were hedged against.” Seward took Lincoln’s letter as a green light to continue his compromise efforts. But realizing that Lincoln’s concession would not satisfy southerners who preferred the Crittenden plan, he did not make it public. Nothing came of the New Mexico idea, but Congress did in February organize three new territories—Colorado, Nebraska, and Nevada—with no mention of slavery. This reflected not a sudden embrace of Douglas’s popular sovereignty doctrine, but Republicans’ conviction, stated in the 1860 platform, that slavery could not legally exist under federal jurisdiction.
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After delivering a moving farewell speech to his Springfield neighbors, in which he said he was about to “assume a task more difficult than that which devolved upon General Washington,” Lincoln on February 11 departed on a journey by train to the nation’s capital. The circuitous 2,000-mile trip took Lincoln to state capitals such as Indianapolis, Columbus, Albany, Trenton, and Harrisburg, and numerous other cities, large and small. It lasted twelve days, during which time Lincoln made more than 100 impromptu speeches. Generally delivered before large, enthusiastic crowds, his remarks gave hundreds of thousands of northerners their first real glimpse of Lincoln himself and of his thinking on the crisis. Lincoln repeatedly tried to persuade southerners that his administration would pose no threat to them or to slavery, while seeking to satisfy Republican demands for firmness. But overall, his speeches did not augur well for reconciliation. Nothing, he said, “can ever bring me willingly to consent to the destruction of this Union.” He did not threaten war but neither did he reject that possibility, and he denied that retaking federal property seized by the Confederacy or enforcing federal laws would constitute “coercion.” Already, Lincoln was positioning the Union as the victim, not the aggressor, if war broke out. There would be no bloodshed, he announced, unless “forced upon the government.”
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